The minutes of the February 18, 2003, and the
minutes of the Tuesday, March 11, 2003 meetings were approved as
distributed.

IR Steering Committee

The Chair announced that there has not been an IR
Steering Committee meeting since the last IRC meeting, but there may
possibly be one on Wednesday, April 24th, at which time they expect to
discuss the Web Accessibility Policy.

Distributed Computing Support Management Team

Maurice Leatherbury reported for the Distributed
Computing Support Management Team that at their last meeting they
talked about Microsoft dropping support for Windows 98 and agreed to
encourage people in their departments to stop using old operating
systems. The group also discussed a desktop back-up software
package but since the cost was prohibitive, they decided to explore
other alternatives.

Maurice also announced that notification of the
discontinuance of Premium and free dial-up services has been sent out
to the UNT campus community by several methods, including a
press release, through Benchmarks, and through various electronic mail
resources. His staff is looking for other free or low-cost
services to suggest to users as alternatives to what UNT has been
providing.

Instruction Planning Group

Jenny Jopling reported that since the Instruction
Planning Group does not currently have a charge, they have not been
meeting.

Communications Planning Group

Maurice Leatherbury reported for the
Communications Planning Group that they will meet on Thursday, April
24, 2003 to work on revising a Connections Policy that was previously
approved by the IRC but never forwarded to the Vice Presidents.

EIS Planning Group

Joneel Harris reported for the EIS Planning Group
that the project is progressing satisfactorily. An internal
audit of the EIS project is nearly completed, and they are about to
begin a quality assurance audit by Ciber. In addition, the
Project Management Group has reorganized to provide more time for John
Hooper to coordinate the technical side of the project. Bob
Woelfel from the Health Science Center will take a more active role in
coordinating the work of the family product groups. They are, of
course, concerned about the budget cuts and hiring freezes and their
impact on the project. The Health Science Center has already had
to make cuts in their personnel and expect to have to make more.
Of greatest concern is in the area of Contributor Relations, where HSC
has already lost 4 out of their 8 positions.

Research Planning Group

Maurice Leatherbury reported for the Research
Planning Group that they have met to discuss research projects that
could potentially be funded by money that the Computing Center
had set aside in support of research. The group seemed to want
to focus on infrastructure projects, such as storage area networks.
The group’s next meeting is Thursday, April 24th at 4pm.

Standards & Policy Planning Group

Kenn Moffitt reported for the Standards & Policy
Planning Group that they have not met since the last IRC meeting, but
have a meeting scheduled to work on a GroupWise Policy that they
plan to bring to the IRC.

Student Computing Planning Group

Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner reported for the Student
Computing Planning Group that they will meet Monday, April 21st at 2pm
to work on a draft of the Student Computing Services survey.

Distance Learning Team

Jenny Jopling reported for the Distance Learning
Team that they are scheduled to meet on Thursday, April 24th, but have
not met since the last IRC meeting. She stated that new verbiage
has been proposed for announcing weather-related university closings,
which gives additional information related to on-line courses, which
are not necessarily delayed or canceled due to weather conditions.
Dr. Turner added that a plan is being formulated that would provide a
auto switch-over to a back-up server in the event the WebCT server
should go down as a result of inclement weather conditions or under
any other circumstances.

Lou Ann Bradley
moved for approval of the minutes of the April 15, 2003 meeting; Jon
Nelson seconded and the minutes were approved as distributed.

IR Steering Committee

The Chair
reported that the IR Steering Committee approved the Web Accessibility
Policy at their recent meeting, and he commended Kenn Moffitt for his
presentation at that meeting.

Distributed Computing Support Management Team

Maurice
Leatherbury reported for the Distributed Computing Support Management
Team that at their recent meeting they continued their discussion of
desktop back-up alternatives. The committee also discussed the
development of a retention schedule for electronic records, including
GroupWise email. In addition, Maurice reported that Dell is
making every effort to be competitive with Hewlett-Packard in
providing UNT with servers, and although H-P has a new program
which will give UNT even deeper discounts, Dell is planning to make a
new pricing proposal to try and beat that.

News from the Chair

The Chair noted
that Dell has a workstation deal on their Website for faculty and
students in which they offer a 10% discount plus commercial level
support.

The Chair
announced that a new UNT committee called Electronic Thesis and
Dissertation Policy Committee has requested that a member of the
Information Resources Council be elected to serve on it. Philip
Baczewski nominated Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner for that position, Jon
Nelson seconded, and the council elected Elizabeth by acclamation.

There was no
report from the Instruction Planning Group since they had not met.

Communications Planning Group

Lou Ann Bradley
reported for the Communications Planning Group that they continue to
work on a revision of the policy on Addition of Devices to the UNT
network.

EIS Planning Group

Coy Hoggard
reported for the EIS Planning Group that everyone was working very
hard and that things were going well and on schedule. Plans are
to begin using the centralized purchasing application in July, not by
distributed areas, but by the Purchasing Dept. staff at first.
The General Ledger system will be live by September 1, 2003, as well
as Admissions and Development, with Payroll and Personnel systems
going live in January of 2004. Coy stated that Joneel Harris is
doing a series of overview presentations in the coming weeks and all
of the sessions are full; however, additional sessions will be
scheduled and their times announced later. Coy pointed out that
those interested can go to the EIS Website at
www.unt.edu/eis where there is a navigation tutorial under
Presentations.

Research Planning Group

Maurice
Leatherbury reported for the Research Planning Group that they have
met and have come to the conclusion that there are no pressing items
to recommend to the council. There was discussion of the Storage
Area Network (SAN) and plans were made to conduct a trial
connection of an academic department (Library & Information Sciences)
to the SAN in the Computing & Information Technology Center.

Standards & Policy Planning Group

Maurice
Leatherbury reported for the Standards & Policy Planning Group that
they met to discuss GroupWise “Everyone” message guidelines and plan
to continue that discussion at their next meeting.

Student Computing Planning Group

Philip Baczewski
reported for the Student Computing Planning Group that they are
continuing the development of questions for the Student Computing
Survey which will be conducted in the Fall.

Distributed Learning Team

Patrick Pluscht
reported for the Distributed Learning Team that a new release of WebCT
called VISTA will be out shortly though an official release date has
not yet been announced. The committee is planning a migration
path to the new version, making plans for CDL staff to be trained, and
planning pilot courses in the Fall, with a roll-out of the new product
in Spring 2004. The current WebCT version would be concurrently
supported until Fall 2004 with a cutover date in Spring 2005.
Patrick stated that a considerable effort will have to be put into the
conversion of current versions of courses into Vista. The new
version is supported by the same Oracle database software as the EIS
project software, will do load-balancing, and has other capabilities
as well. Patrick reported that the streaming media server has
been upgraded and plans are to have a redundant system up and running
by the end of the summer. Also, Patrick has been consulted about
putting some new video conference rooms at Research Park when funding
becomes available.

Patrick announced
that Don Foshee, Founding President of the Texas Distance Learning
Association, passed away May 13th of natural causes.
He had been the keynote speaker at many conferences including the
TxDLA annual conference hosted in Ft. Worth last year. Patrick
stated that he was key to the formation of the Texas Distance Learning
Association, and was a member of the Hall of Fame of the United States
Distance Learning Association.

IRC
Meeting Schedule

The
IRC generally meets
on the third Tuesday of each month, from 2-4
p.m., in the Administration Building Board Room.
From time to time there are planned exceptions to
this schedule.
All meetings of the IRC, its program groups, and
other committees, are open to all faculty, staff,
and students.